Federal money at work

ACCLAIMED ARTIST George Post painted this mural for the Works Project Administration in 1934. The mural, in the Sonora High School Library, depicts Tuolumne County industries. Maggie Beck/Union Democrat

But past major infrastructure spending — like that presented in President Barack Obama’s plan, called the most ambitious since the Interstate highway system was built in the 1950s — made an impression on the region that has survived for decades.

They include schools, trails and some other things of which people might not think. They also created jobs and laid the foundation for an economy fueled by natural resources and tourism.

Most were the fruit of Depression-era programs aimed at creating employment. Programs like the Public Works Administration, Works Progress Administration and Work Projects Administration — variations of the same agency launched by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 on April 8, 1935, and carried forward by Franklin D. Roosevelt through the 1940s.

There is no central location for WPA records, as there were so many branches, but the California Historical Society in San Francisco is compiling a list of all of the Depression-era public works projects, called the California’s Living New Deal Project, said Sharon Marovich, chairwoman of the Tuolumne Heritage Committee.

The WPA worked in conjunction with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program for young men from unemployed families established in 1933.
  

The CCC became one of the most popular programs and operated in every state in the country.

WPA workers were paid between $19 and $94 per month, depending on where they were, what they were doing and the individual worker’s skill level.

The CCC did massive forestry and fire protection work. Dozens of camps were erected around the area including camps in Dorrington, Mokelumne Hill, Italian Bar, Tuolumne, Jupiter, Buck Meadows, Corral Creek, Greeley Hill, Strawberry, Columbia, Yankee Hill, El Portal, Coulterville and Groveland.

The Yankee Hill camp opened in 1933, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection records show.

“The Yankee Hill camp accomplished many major tasks in Tuolumne County. Most significant was the Ralph Airport,” the CDF records state.

CCC crews also worked on a major section of the Ponderosa Way firebreak and truck trail system. They constructed the Rushing Hill Mountain lookout house, 53 miles of CDF telephone lines and 23.9 miles of roads. They also reconstructed 24.4 miles of existing roads, constructed the Sonora CDF Fire Suppression crew barracks, office building and warehouse, and landscaped the grounds.

Workers built four bridges and eight concrete-rail cattle guards, the CDF report said.

Public works crews also did much of the stone work and retaining walls in Yosemite National Park.

According to the Yosemite Gazette, 10 CCC camps were in Yosemite National Park from 1933 to 1940 with 6,816 enrollees.

“An outstanding achievement of the recruits was the rebuilding in May 1934 of the stairway ascending the eastern face of Half Dome,” the Gazette reported in 2008.

The Half Dome cables, originally installed in 1920 by the Sierra Club, were replaced and strengthened by CCC workers. They also made improvements in Yosemite Village including adding log curbing and paths, planting shrubs and trees and revitalizing a historic apple orchard. Miles of access roads were built and rock gardens were made by springs to enable safe drinking from them. The most notable is Fern Spring.

The CCC is also responsible for constructing much of the infrastructure in the Stanislaus National Forest, including “roads, trails, bridges, dams, campgrounds, lookout towers, ranger stations, pretty much everything,” said Stacy Lundgren, archaeologist for the Mi-Wok Ranger District.

“At the program’s peak in California, 30,000 young men worked on public lands, about 7,400 of them in state and national parks,” wrote Gray Brechin of the Living New Deal Project in Bay Nature magazine.

Very few of the men came from the area, though many stayed here afterwards, Lundgren said. Ninety percent of the men came from east of the Mississippi River, though 90 percent of the public works projects were west of the Mississippi.

Each camp typically had 50 men. Each man’s stint was six months and they could re-enlist for a total of two years, Lundgren said. 

In the Stanislaus National Forest, there were five camps in the Mi-Wok Ranger District, three in the Calaveras Ranger District, two in the Summit Ranger District and three in Groveland, which included the Buck Meadows camp.

The Yankee Hill camp was for state projects, Lundgren said. However, they did work on the forest as well, besides clearing rocks out of what became the Columbia airfield.

Lundgren will be conducting a “Passport in Time” volunteer program this summer to record the remaining portions of the Ponderosa Way, an 800-mile-long fuel-break that started in Shasta County and ran all the way to Kern County.

“It was the largest CCC project in the state of California,” Lundgren said. “We still use the Ponderosa Way. In fact it was instrumental last year in that Telegraph Fire.”

Lundgren said a lot of the talk recently among Forest Service officials is about what projects they would do if another massive public works program were launched.

“There’s so much to do and so few people to do it anymore,” Lundgren said. “Our infrastructure’s in bad shape, particularly our roads.”

Like Obama’s proposed plan could, the government-funded projects benefited both youth and community members.

The Sonora Youth Center on Barretta Street was put into service in 1943 by the National Youth Administration, the WPA for youth. It was for people 18 to 25 years old.

“It helped them support their families and gain skills for later in life,” Marovich said.

Marovich is in the process of trying to get the log cabin-style building added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Other projects in Sonora have become iconic, like Sonora High School’s Dunlavy Stadium, which was dedicated on Sept. 24, 1937. It seats about 4,500 people and is built of rock and concrete. In 2001, it was listed in USA Today as one of the Top 10 places in the United States to watch a high school football team.

Tuolumne County Historian Carlo De Ferrari can remember, while attending high school at that time, going down and watching the WPA workers do blasting work.

According to De Ferrari, the WPA also did a lot of work on Wards Ferry Road, widening it.

Many projects undertaken by the WPA were small or had a variety of funding sources.

WPA crews also constructed a wall and bleachers at the Sonora Dome, now occupied by Sonora Union High School District’s administrative offices.

The Sonora City Hall building was built through a combination of WPA and bond funds, newspaper reports say, and was completed in 1939.

The Tuolumne Veterans Memorial Hall also had federal participation, Marovich said. The massive multipurpose building was completed in 1936 and has been an asset to Tuolumne, Marovich said.

In Calaveras County, WPA crews excavated a basement for the Mokelumne Hill Town Hall, built in 1901. 

Perhaps one of the larger projects receiving federal aid was the Columbia Airport. Through federal aid, the Civil Conservation Corps and the support of the American Legion, the airport site was cleared off and leveled.

It was officially dedicated as Ralph Airport on June 16, 1935, according to the Chispa, the quarterly magazine of the Tuolumne County Historical Society.

In addition to public buildings and roads, the WPA operated large arts and literacy projects, which like the Ponderosa Way, have survived the test of time.

Acclaimed watercolor artist George Post was hired by the Public Works Administration in 1936. His first assignment was a mural to be painted for Sonora High School depicting industries in Tuolumne County, which included lumber, mining and agriculture.

Post created the only oil painting of his career, a mural eight feet high by 36 feet long, which is still in the Sonora High library today.

The work took him a month and a half to complete, Post said in a 1964 interview with the Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution. He was paid $90 per month as a WPA artist.

“It was a most wonderful sort of experience to have so much freedom and to be getting $90 per month, which in those days was a fortune because we were all getting along on so little money,” Post said. “I also think that the amount that was accomplished, like the parks and the roads and the conservation, was remarkable and I certainly feel that the Art Project gave an awful lot of American artists the stimulus and the start that they needed at this time.”

From 1935 to 1943, the WPA provided almost 8 million jobs to previously out of work Americans. Until it was closed down by Congress in 1943, it was the largest employer in the country.

By April 1936, the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works allotted $226,642 for five non-federal projects at an estimated cost of $503,649, said the June 19, 1936, Union Democrat.

Obama has said his $819 billion measure would save or create more than 3 million new jobs over the next few years. The plan will inject $75 billion of stimulus into the economy, plus an additional $45 billion that can be injected into the economy quickly if it continues to deteriorate.

As laid out in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the plan would disburse the $819 billion over two years, which includes $159 billion in infrastructure spending. The plan details $90 billion in traditional infrastructure such as highway construction, public transportation and waterways and $70 billion for a variety of non-traditional projects including energy, science and health care, said a report from Moody’s Analytics.

The plan also includes $20 billion to renovate elementary and secondary schools and $5.2 billion in community development grants.

The Congressional Budget Office analysis of the plan anticipates implementation “would have a noticeable impact on growth and employment in the next few years.”